Necromancer of the Black Forest

The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest is a Gothic novel by Ludwig Flammenberg (which is a pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert) first published in 1794. It is one of the seven 'horrid novels' lampooned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, once thought not to exist except in the text of Northanger Abbey.

The novel consists of a series of lurid tales of hauntings, violence, killings and the supernatural featuring the adventures of Hermann and Helfried and the mysterious wizard Volkert the Necromancer, who has seemingly come back from the dead, set in the Black Forest in Germany.

It has recently been republished in a modern edition by Valancourt Books which confirms the identity of the book's German author. Originally said to have been "Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg by Peter Teuthold," a number of its readers, including scholarly readers, assumed this to be a way of adding to the authenticity of a Gothic text by claiming a German genealogy, a common British publishing practice in its day. However, this novel was originally written in German by Karl Friedrich Kahlert and then translated by Peter Teuthold.

Teuthold's translated version of the novel differs from Kahlert's original German version substantially, most noticeably in the conscious addition of a plagiarized portion of the tale forming the robber Christian Wolf's confession from Friedrich Schiller's Der Verbrecher aus verlorner Ehre, written in 1786. Though very little is known about Teuthold, his translation, written unfaithfully to the original German text, reveals him to be "a conservative Englishman with anti-Jacobin sympathies who deliberately designed his translation to discredit German literature." Furthermore, the disorganization of the narrative (i.e., its confusing structure of frame narratives) was a result of Teuthold's poor management of his translation sources. "What might have been an anthology of separate legends and supernatural tales about the Black Forest was hastily amalgamated into a nearly incomprehensible Germanic Gothic meant to allure the [publishing company's] readers." One English contemporary review, published in 1794, comments on the poor quality of Teuthold's translation: "This work calls itself a translation from the German: out of respect to such of our countrymen as are authors, we heartily wish it may be a translation. We should be sorry to see an English original so full of absurdities."